Federico García Lorca

Maria M. Delgado

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415362429
• eBook ISBN: 9781134231317
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

Immortalized in death by The Clash, Pablo Neruda, Salvador Dalí, Dmitri Shostakovich and Lindsay Kemp, Federico García Lorca's spectre haunts both contemporary Spain and the cultural landscape beyond.

This study offers a fresh examination of one of the Spanish language's most resonant voices; exploring how the very factors which led to his emergence as a cultural icon also shaped his dramatic output.

The works themselves are also awarded the space that they deserve, combining performance histories with incisive textual analysis to restate Lorca's presence as a playwright of extraordinary vision, in works such as:

• Blood Wedding
• The Public
• The House of Bernarda Alba
• Yerma.

Federico García Lorca is an invaluable new resource for those seeking to understand this complex and multifaceted figure: artist, playwright, director, poet, martyr and in the eyes of many, Spain's 'national dramatist'.

1 Life, politics and mythology

He [Lorca] was his own masterpiece…. He himself, as an individual, far surpassed his work.

(Buñuel 1985:158, 102)

The problems of mapping Lorca’s life are as fraught as those of writing the historiography of his productions – in both cases the ‘performance’ or signified is resolutely absent. If as Joseph Roach reminds us, theatre history is a discipline fraught with a sense of ‘irretrievable loss’, then we should remain alert to the ‘desolating inadequacy’ of piecing together a narrative account where so much remains subject to ‘the hallucinationary images of fiction’ (Roach 1992:293, 297). The problems inherent in attempting any kind of ‘objective’ reconstruction of a chronological survey of Lorca’s life when the empirical evidence is anything but neutral, have been noted by prevous critics (Fernández Cifuentes 1988; Smith 1998:2). This chapter does not seek to provide an exhaustive account of his life, rather it draws on historical documents – existent biographies, testimonies from friends and relatives, correspondence, interviews and lectures – to examine selective episodes that illustrate the mythification of Lorca in life and death.

The myth of Lorca

Any discussion of Lorca the playwright and theatremaker is habitually prefixed by the construction, in death, of a larger-than-life persona, a ‘staggering one-man show’ (Gibson 1989: xx) – pianist, artist, dramatist, poet, actor, director, and raconteur – preserved forever young in our collective consciousness. From the studied brooding pose of the cover photograph of Gibson’s biography to the playful, flamboyant portrait adorning Stainton’s account of his life, he gazes out at the reader, both subject and object, fetishized and preserved in an eternally youthful image of attractive, elusive allure: a tall, olive-skinned young man with a round face peppered with moles and a clump of shiny black hair plastered over his wide forehead (see Figure 1, p. 20).

The portraits painted in death by friends and associates of the ‘husky voiced’ poet (Cernuda 1970:157) with ‘a magnetism that few could resist’ (Buñuel 1985:61) have served to construct the myth of an ‘irresistible’ (Dalí 1949:203) ‘brilliant and charming’ being (Buñuel 1985:61), captivating attention when he played the piano or read from his work (Alberti 1988:168–70; Cernuda 1970:158). In the absence of existent recordings of his voice, these endorsements, from artists, filmmakers and poets who gained iconic status in their own fields, were legitimized as authoritative statements. The construct of Lorca as ‘performer’, introducing stagings of his plays and holding informal recitals of his work in his home, in cafés and at parties, has effectively fixed his life within performative paradigms. Lorca was a celebrity in his own lifetime, feted at social events in the vein of star bullfighters of the day (OCIII 529; Martínez Nadal 1974:11). References to poems scribbled on the back of photos (Buñuel 1985:63), habitual lateness (León 1977:212) and allegations of parapsychological powers (Gibson 1989:385, 391) have positioned him as the perennial nonconformist, improvising life on the go. In many ways the legacy of his dramaturgy has been obscured by lorquismo; as his friend Rafael Martínez Nadal was to observe on hearing him recite a poem in 1923, he couldn’t be sure whether the poem was good or whether it was just well read (Martínez Nadal 1980:22–3; Stainton 1999:120–1). While Lorca conceived writing and directing as a profession rather than an art (García Lorca 1986:122), the myth of the doomed ‘child of the muses’ prevails (Gibson 1989: xx).

The Andalusian icon

In many ways one only has to consider Lorca’s repeated assertion that he was born alongside the new century and the citation of 1899 as his date of birth by early critics (Campbell 1952:9; Honig 1945:11) to realize how slippery and contested much of what is given as ‘fact’ actually is. Lorca once extravagantly claimed that he had read only two books in his life, The Bible and A Thousand and One Nights, at other times he boasted of being a voracious reader, devouring at least two works a day (Stainton 1999:121). Hyperbole, theatrics and storytelling are part of the fabric of Lorca’s biography. Pablo Neruda makes reference to happiness as ‘as much a part of him as his skin’ (Neruda 1977:115), perhaps unwittingly feeding the image of the happy-go-lucky torero bounding through life. Other friends are more revealing in their mapping of his periods of intense self-absorption or dramones (Alberti 1984:200; Aleixandre 1978:289; Morla Lynch 1957:14). Lorca’s early writings and testaments of his childhood betray an interest in theatrics, game-play, storytelling and disguise that has been much commented on in past surveys of his life and influences (see OCIV 858–61; Edwards 1980:5; García Lorca 1986:102; Stainton 1999:25–6). There are accounts of his dressing up as a priest to recite mass at the back of the house where he insisted the assembled congregation weep during his sermon (Gibson 1989:15–16), his dolling up of maids and siblings to perform in home entertainments and his breaking of a piggy bank to purchase a toy theatre (García Lorca 1983:9), his love of church ceremonials and palpable excitement when puppeteers came to town (Higuera Rojas 1980:98–101, 166). Anecdotes from family servants and the copious relatives with whom he had contact litter his plays (see García Lorca 1986:47–69).

While he is habitually viewed as the poet of the marginalized – gypsies, women, gay men, African Americans – Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was born into an affluent family. His father, Federico García Rodríguez, was a wealthy landowner and Lorca and his three younger siblings benefited from a comfortable, cultured existence: a well-stocked library, music lessons and paternal patronage. Federico García Rodríguez bankrolled a number of Lorca’s publications including his first anthology, Impressions and Landscapes (1918). This collection of writings brought together reports of travels across Andalusia, Castile, Léon and Galicia undertaken with fellow Granada University students under the tutelage of the art historian Martín Domínguez Berrueta, contemplations of his native Granada and reflections on artistic endeavour. The cultivation of the Lorca myth has been based, in part, on the rebuttal of a life slavishly in thrall to social conventions, but his perennial student existence was made possible only by his father’s lasting economic support. Only when Blood Wedding, Mariana Pineda and The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife were presented in Argentina in 1933–4 did Lorca earn any significant financial sums for his writing.

The myth of Lorca as maverick has been fed by a poor academic record, both at school in Granada and later at Granada’s university (1914–23), where he struggled to complete his degree. The reassessment of his academic record provided by Andrew Anderson points, however, to the dramatist’s possible dyslexia. The evidence that Lorca had difficulty discerning left from right, did not find it easy to follow maps, and suffered problems with telling the time are used by Anderson (1999:702) to lend weight to his argument. Lorca did not share his younger brother’s academic prowess, was a late talker and walker and demonstrated a penchant for music that Anderson notes has been linked by writers on dyslexia to the disability. The manuscripts demonstrate awkward handwriting, misspellings, corrections, variable capitalization, erratic punctuation and a transposition of consonants that also function as indicators of dyslexia (Anderson 1999:703, 700, 707).

The Granadine landscape in which Lorca spent his early years has been located as a key influence on his writing, providing a context for his plays and poems, a vocabulary of imagery, and a cultural format that drew on the myths, legends and history of the region (see OCIII 523–8; Morris 1997). The family homes in the villages of Fuente Vaqueros and Asquerosa (now renamed Valderrubio), part of the lush plain surrounding the city of Granada where Lorca spent the first ten years of his life, are now museums that further validate the importance of Granada to an understanding of the poet’s oeuvre (see pp. 192–8). At the University of Granada Lorca cultivated a lasting friendship with Fernando de los Ríos, Professor of Political Law and founder of the city’s Socialist Party. He travelled out to New York with Lorca in 1929 and as Minister of Public Instruction during Spain’s Second Republic (1931–6) was to play an instrumental part in the establishment of La Barraca, the student theatre company that Lorca directed between 1932 and 1935 (see pp. 26–33). At Granada’s Café Alameda, Lorca was part of a tertulia or literary gathering named El Rinconcillo (The Little Corner) whose members included the journalists José Mora Guarnido (author of an early critical study of Lorca) and Constantino Ruiz Carnero (later to become editor of the local broadsheet El Defensor de Granada), the critic Melchor Fernández Almagro, the painter Manuel Ángeles Ortiz, and the guitarist Andrés Segovia. As well as literary activities the group provided tours of the city’s hidden corners to visiting artists and writers (like H.G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling) and arranged for plaques to be put up commemorating writers who had visited or lived in the city (Gibson 1989:60–1). Mora Guarnido (1958:54) sees the encouragement of the members of El Rinconcillo as key to Lorca’s decision to write poetry. The exodus to Madrid of a number of the group’s regulars may have been one of the factors that precipitated Lorca’s move to the Spanish capital in 1919.

Even during his Madrid years Lorca returned regularly to Granada. Summers were generally spent at the Huerta de San Vicente, the summer home purchased by his father in 1926, and now the third Lorca museum in or around Granada (see pp. 195–8). With composer Manuel de Falla, Lorca hatched plans for a travelling theatre company that might preserve local bawdy puppet traditions and realized an Epiphany show with puppets and chamber orchestra for his younger sister Isabel at the family home in 1923 (García Lorca 1986:142–7). The Festival of Cante Jondo, flamenco’s deep song, organized with Falla in 1922, celebrated a performance system that was to shape his own literary discourse and the popular conception of him as the gypsy poet. Analysing cante jondo as ‘a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation … a very rare specimen of primitive song, the oldest in all Europe’, developed by the gypsies on arriving in Andalusia and a profound influence on musical composition from Felipe Pedrell and Isaac Albéniz to Falla (OCIII 35–6; GL 1991:25), Lorca deemed the singers or cantaors as expressive mediums of the Andalusian people, eschewing affectation for embodiment. If Gypsy Ballads, his 1928 anthology, now ‘the most widely read, most often recited, most studied and most celebrated book of poems in the whole of Spanish literature’ (Gibson 1989:136), positioned him as the public voice of Andalusia’s downtrodden gypsies, then the poems he crafted inspired by cante jondo, subsequently published in 1931, consolidated that view.

While flamenco has proved a powerful idiom in the production and reception of Andalusian culture, the careful tracing of its codified ethics and performative languages have all too often been substituted by glib generalizations and a reinforcing of problematic stereotypes that equate the country’s cultures with sangría, bullfighting and castanets. The origins of flamenco lie with the gypsies of Spain, who arrived in the Balkans from India and the Far East in medieval times and gradually spread across the breadth of Europe, settling in Spain in the fifteenth century where they were subjected to a wide range of cultural influences – Byzantine, Moorish, Judaic – and evolved the blend of toque (guitar), clapping and finger clicking (which offer a percussive rhythm), cante (song) and baile (dance), commonly referred to as flamenco.

Gypsy culture, as embodied in flamenco, has become ‘a paradigm for the exotic’ (Fraser 1992:125). Lorca’s correspondence betrays unease at the positioning of his work within gypsy prisms (OCIII 306, 364, 379). Despite protestations that his work was ‘antifolklore, anti-local color, and anti-Flamenco’, containing ‘not one short jacket, suit of lights, wide-brimmed hat or Andalusian tambourine’ (OCIII 179; GL 1991:105), the conceits of flamenco have proved an enduring register through which to read it. Even the ostensibly surrealist anthology Poet in New York has been read as a cantaor’s lament (Stone 2004:89–118).

The interweaving of Gypsy and Andalusian in the popular imagination may have played a role in Lorca turning his work away from an ostensibly Andalusian heritage, as evidenced by the erasure on the first page of the manuscript of The House of Bernarda Alba of a reference to the action taking place in ‘an Andalusian village of dry lands’ (Hernández 1984:20). If Lorca is now viewed as Spain’s ‘national’ poet, this is in part due to the fact that Spain’s cultural construction has been indelibly marked by the idioms and myths of Andalusia. Even the cover of the first edition of Gypsy Ballads, featuring a blood-red map of Spain, testifies to an interweaving of the national and the regional in ways that draw upon the iconography of both.

The national poet

There is a strong critical consensus that views Lorca as ‘the essence of Spain’ (Neruda 1984:60) and ‘Spanish to the point of exaggeration’ (Cernuda 1970:162), assessing his work as essentialist in its embodiment of facets of Spanishness (Johnston 1998a: 41; Río 1952:153, 167–8). As an early critic was to remark, ‘Lorca never left Spain’ and when he crossed its borders he took the country with him in his suitcase (Sánchez 1950:154). Lorca’s correspondence from New York in 1929–30 indicates the profound disorientation of a poor linguist. Part of the myth of Lorca as the ‘universal’ poet lies in his supposed recognition of the plight of the oppressed and acknowledged marginalized positions, but his own standardization of African Americans as ‘melancholy … very good people’ (OCIII 1114), betrays more awkward associations. Indeed his oft-cited phrase, ‘I don’t understand anything’ (Adams 1977:121; Río 1952:93–4), offers a mode of reading his vision of the city as a surreal concrete jungle that he could access in only the most superficial of ways. Protestantism was dismissed as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘hateful’ with Catholicism lauded as superior to all other religions (OCIII 1115, 1122–3). Poems written just over a month after his arrival were classified ‘typically North American’ (OCIII 1120). The landscape was dismissed as uniformly similar with Coney Island singled out as ‘monstrous, like everything in this country’ (OCIII 1126, 1109). Wall Street met with particular venom, tainted by a ‘vicious Dionysiac worship of money’ (OCIII 1125–6). His view of jazz as sharing roots with cante jondo (OCIII 1114), both products of persecuted races, fails to take into consideration the particular socio-historical circumstances that engendered each. The exoticization of Harlem is evident in the poems that were to make up the posthumous anthology, Poet in New York. In the hostile, dehumanized, concrete metropolis, African American culture stands in stark contrast to a landscape that functions as a displaced object on which Lorca projects his frustration, anger and despair (Havard 2001:112–41).

Lorca’s vision of Cuba, where he spent three months in 1930, was irrevocably shaped by his father’s cigar boxes adorned with colourful folkloric labels (Marinello 1965:18–19). His letters betray the exoticization of the African Cuban population that ran through his documented encounters with African American culture in New York (OCIII 1168–9). That he later described it as the happiest period of his life (Río 1952:43) has further shaped the conception of him as a pan-Hispanic writer. The praise lavished on Argentine theatre during his time there in 1933–4, his recognition of the importance of Buenos Aires as a theatrical capital (OCIII 446, 532) and the commercial success enjoyed by Blood Wedding and The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in Buenos Aires consolidated his reputation as the Spanish-language’s premier dramatist. During the lean years of the Franco dictatorship, when his plays were absent from the Spanish stage, they were frequently staged in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico (see Delgado 2003:46–56).

Referring to himself in his final interview as a ‘Spaniard through and through’ (OCIII 637), Lorca’s murder in the early days of the Civil War further tied him to a nation in whose cause he had suffered martyrdom. More so than Picasso or Dalí, whose trajectories are linked to the Parisian avant-garde, Lorca remains the perennial national emblem – the Andalusian writing of his landscape who also acknowledges his ties to Catholicism, the Catalan avant-garde and Galician poetry (OCIII 1115, 137–49, 1072; OCI 607–14).

The year of his birth, 1898, has acquired a profound symbolic resonance in the Spanish psyche as the year in which the country lost the final vestiges of her empire in the Philippines and Cuba to the USA, prematurely closing a century that had been marked by Napoleonic invasion, three civil conflicts, weak monarchies bound up with political machinations, an antiquated governmental infrastructure, periods of military control, and an emergent working class calling for improved working conditions (see Carr 1980:1–40). From this climate of despair and profound self-interrogation came the generation of 1898 that included (among others) the poet Antonio Machado, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Pío Baroja, who all looked to past literary models, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, to analyse the calamity of the present and look at ways of providing a reinvigorated future for a country suffering a lamentable sense of self-worth (see Harrison and Hoyle 2000).

Lorca’s admiration for the Generation of 1898 has been documented (see Handley 1996). As a member of the Generation of 1927 that congregated in Seville to celebrate the renovating poet of Spain’s Golden Age, Luis de Góngora, ‘a symbolist three hundred years before his time’ (Campbell 1952:14), he similarly looked to a poetic idiom of considerable syntactical and metaphorical complexity whose verbal elegance and dexterity provided a bold rendering of the experiential through the iconography of the material world. While he has been judged a theatrical innovator, his dramaturgy, like his poetry, draws copiously on the work of his contemporaries. The historical verse of Eduardo Marquina, the expressionistic folklore and farcical bent of Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and the fabricated Andalusia of the Álvarez Quintero brothers have all been located as potent referents (Domenech 1992; Fernández Cifuentes 1986:25; Río 1952:152).¹ Jacinto Benavente, the Álvarez Quinteros, Benito Pérez Galdós and José Echegaray similarly created dominant female roles for the dominant actress-impresarios of the day. Unamuno and Galdós attempted to forge a stark theatrical language that debated key social issues. Where Lorca may share with Valle-Inclán the sense of theatre as a sensorial art, appealing to both eye and ear (Sánchez 1950:152), his theatre is ultimately more practical in its articulation of the discourses of performance and in its manipulation of the dramaturgical discourses of the Renaissance dramas of Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega (OCIII 218–21; Guardia 1952:357–8; Nieva 1996:124; Sánchez 1950:102–23).

During his time in Madrid (1919–36) Lorca came into contact with a range of the figures currently shaping the city’s literary and cultural scene. These included the poet (and later Nobel Prizewinner) Vicente Aleixandre, the painter and writer José Moreno Villa who was, in 1931, made director of the Royal Library (see Figure 1), and the right-wing poet, José María Hinojosa, who was to be executed by Republicans during the Civil War. The elder statesman of Andalusian letters, Juan Ramón Jiménez, then o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Referencing
• Overview
• 1 Life, politics and mythology
• 2 The ‘known’ Lorcas
• 3 The ‘unknown’ Lorcas
• 4 Lorca’s afterlives
• List of play titles and English translations
• Notes
• Bibliography